Pussy Riot’s imprisonment for being critical of their country’s leader has thrown pretty much the whole history of rock’n’roll “rebellion” into a new light. Suddenly all the supposedly citadel-storming activities of earlier generations look like small potatoes indeed, and their punishments, when they’ve existed at all, amount to precious little in comparison. Radio station bans? Slaps on the wrist for drug offenses? A night or two in jail here and there? Big deal. Pussy Riot are going to a prison camp for two years.

These thoughts are occasioned partly by the knowledge that summer 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the Rolling Stones as a working band.* No one has accrued more credibility through a putative rebel stance than have the Stones, and even if that reputation has been little more than cosmetic for decades now, and was likely more than a little bogus in the first place, its aura persists. In the flattened time-line world engendered by modern technology, the early Stones feel oddly contemporary and are often held up as the acme of oppositional cool by artists whose parents weren’t even born yet in 1962. While it would be nice to see the Stones express a little more generosity toward their progeny–Keith Richards is famously crotchety on the subject of new music generally, and unless I’ve missed it the Stones are not among the artists to have spoken up in Pussy Riot’s defense–there is simply no gainsaying the 1962-1972 Rolling Stones. I’ve got a special fondness for the Brian Jones-era lineup: the clothes and general visual aesthetic are firmly back in fashion**; the low-fi approach to recording, in fact a happy accident forced by period limitations and by Andrew Loog Oldham’s general cluelessness in the studio, is now a fetishised ideal, with bands like The Black Keys making pilgrimages to studios like Muscle Shoals in hopes of tapping into some of that old magic; Jones’ knack for elevating a song with an exotic and counterintuitive addition to the arrangement–the marimba on “Under My Thumb”, the harpsichord on “Lady Jane” and “I Am Waiting”, the recorder on “Ruby Tuesday”, the sitar on “Paint It Black” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”–was uncanny.***

In David Remnick’s stellar piece on Bruce Springsteen in the July 30 edition of the New Yorker, the writer stresses the ongoing vitality of Springsteen’s career by contrasting it with that of the Stones, who “have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band.” “Ouch,” I thought, “that’s a bit harsh.” Then I thought some more and was forced to concede that not only could I not name a great Stones song less than thirty years old, I could name only one or two songs, period, from any album newer (newer!) than Tattoo You.**** So I can’t really dispute Remnick’s claim. But I still don’t like the practice of bolstering one artist’s stature by tearing down another’s. I think we can all agree that both the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen have, on aggregate, added to the sum of human happiness. Certainly at various times in my life they have both meant a lot to me, though now, it must be admitted, the (early) Stones far outstrip Bruce on my iTunes play count. But then, Kraftwerk far outstrip the Stones. And Kurt Vile and Burial far outstrip Kraftwerk. It’s a funny old world.*****

So, then, without further ado, this being ostensibly a books-related blog after all, it’s time for a personally slanted and by no means complete recommendation of some Stones-related reading. I’ll refrain from re-singing the praises of Keith Richards’ Life (a mini-backlash against which seems to be forming, but is easily ignored). You all know that one anyway. For my money the best Stones book–maybe the best rock book, period–is Stanley Booth’s newly reissued The True Adventures of The Rolling Stones, an inside view of the 1969 American tour that culminated in the disastrous (though arguably beneficial for the band’s long-term mystique) free concert at Altamont. That the book wasn’t published until 1984 tells its own tale: Booth got sucked into the maw of the Stones lifestyle and, without the support system enjoyed by the band, took a long time to recover. As he has proven several times since (see his brilliant Rythm Oil: A Journey Through the Music of the American South) Booth is a real writer, and he approaches his Stones assignment with just the right mix of fandom and take-it-or-leave-it cool. It probably helped that, as an American southerner, he embodied the culture that the band were obsessed with at the time; they granted him the kind of access that would be unimaginable in an equivalent case today. The ideal visual complement to Booth’s book is Ethan A. Russell’s Let It Bleed: The Rolling Stones, Altamont and The End of The Sixties. Along with Booth, Russell was one of the party of sixteen–sixteen wouldn’t even cover Lady Gaga’s wardrobe needs today–who accompanied the band everywhere on that tour. If you ever needed further proof, here is an iron-clad case that the peak-period Stones were the most photogenic band ever, and without really trying–or rather, probably because they weren’t trying. As for all the pompous talk of Altamont representing The End of The Sixties, Mick Taylor gets the last word: “Well, it was the end of the sixties. It was December 1969.”

Finally, three fantastically absorbing titles that aren’t aren’t strictly Stones tomes but wouldn’t exist without the connection are Andrew Loog Oldham’s two-part memoir, Stoned and 2Stoned, and Marianne Faithfull’s Faithfull: An Autobiography. Both are by people crucial to the Stones narrative: Oldham was the manager/producer/svengali who arguably created the band’s bad boy image and goaded Mick and Keith into becoming songwriters at a time when they were content to do blues covers, while Faithfull was Jagger’s muse at a pivotal point in his artistic development and a vital conduit between the band and the upper classes. In a pattern that repeats itself throughout the Stones’ early years, both came away from their time with the band bearing serious addictions, but happily both ultimately came through, and are great raconteurs to boot.

*It also marks the golden anniversary of Ringo Starr’s joining the Beatles. We can be sure that in the coming years the golden birthdays of each group’s signature records will be marked too, one by one, as they come up. So if you’re not into such things, you might want to consider a personal media boycott from now until, say, 2021. And it won’t only be the Beatles and the Stones. Personally I’ll be raising a glass on the day in 2014 when the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” turns fifty.

**A discreet veil is best drawn over many of the band’s sartorial decisions in subsequent decades: Mick Jagger’s Jerry Lewis/golfer look of the late ‘70s, Keith’s Halloween pirate getup of recent years, and probably most painful of all, the early-80s wearing of football pants and other workout-related gear, in bright primary colours sometimes accessorized by kneepads and shoulder pads. What were they thinking?

***A good juncture, perhaps, to vent on the old Beatles vs Stones shibboleth, that tired old claim that you have to choose one or the other. In short, I call b.s. on that school of thought. It’s ridiculous, it’s reductive, it’s anti-life. It’s like saying you can’t like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And it ignores something that seems self-evident in retrospect, which is that the two greatest bands ever were at their best when they were most like each other, when the Stones were edging toward the Beatles’ pop song-craft and studio experimentation (with a strong element of The Kinks thrown in on the cruelly underrated Between The Buttons and Pink Floyd on Their Satanic Majesties Request), and the Beatles, on songs like “Get Back”, “Come Together”, “Don’t Let Me Down”, and “Old Brown Shoe”, were finding country-funk grooves every bit as slinky and deep as what the Stones were mining on Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed.

****And I bought those albums when they were new, and listened to them at least…oh, two or three times each.

*****All too often, I’ve been finding, my thoughts on the Rolling Stones take the form of a list of “lasts”: last great album (Exile on Main Street), last very good album (Tattoo You), last canon-worthy song (“One Hit (To The Body)”, from the otherwise negligible Dirty Work), last great song still awaiting wider discovery (“Winter” from Goats Head Soup), etc.

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